Mmm…yeah, my own exposure of the sport is limited to pasty middle-aged fatsos so I assumed that a competition bicycle HAD to cost at least a few grand. I didn’t consider those outside of the U.S. Although in my defense, if forgetting about the rest of the world doesn’t deem me to be a patriotic American, then I don’t know what does!

FSonicSmith said:
The reality is this; 1)Blatantly illegal PEDs are rampant in professional cycling and have been for over 40 years if not longer; 2)The organizers of the TdF failed to devote the funding necessary to keep the testing protocols at the cutting edge level necessary to be effective-so to put it plainly and simply-the fact that LA never had a test sample come back positive means little other than the obvious-that he did not get caught.

AUSTIN, Texas – After a decade of denial, Lance Armstrong has finally come clean: He used performance-enhancing drugs to win the Tour de France.

The disgraced cyclist made the confession to Oprah Winfrey during an interview taped Monday, a person familiar with the situation told The Associated Press. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the interview is to be broadcast Thursday on Winfrey’s network.

Doping might sometimes be a victimless crime, but not in the case of Lance Armstrong, whose drug abuse and illicit blood transfusions created a phony empire of wealth, adulation and power that had to be protected at all costs.

The Armstrong myth was so lucrative that suppressing the truth came to require an endless behind-the-scenes campaign to bully and intimidate people into silence. Some of it bordered on gangsterism. Some of it was dressed up in the respectable wardrobe of elite law firms. But mostly it was just hot air – a fact that by 2010 had become clear enough to Floyd Landis that he stepped up and burst the bubble, blowing the whistle on the whole big fraud.

In 2008, when the Daily News started reporting in earnest on the growing evidence that Armstrong had cheated, we found that paranoia struck deep in the cycling world. It’s a small industry, and Armstrong was a transcendent figure, so powerful inside his sport that people feared for their livelihoods and reputations if they crossed him.